What was launched

Pixel 2 andPixel 2 XL: two phones, little and large, with OLED screens, a focus on computational photography, and a lot of passive aggression towards Apple. They’ll be available for pre-order today shipping 19 October and 15 November, for £629/$649 and £799/$849 respectively

Google Home Mini: a small smart speaker which can’t really do music but can pair with another wireless smart speaker, designed to get the Google Assistant throughout your house. It will sell for £49/$49, with pre-orders open today, and be in stores on 19 October.

Google Home Max: a large smart speaker which really can do music, aimed squarely at competing products from Apple and Sonos. It’ll cost $399, and be out – in the US only – in December.

Google Clips: An always-on camera for shooting your pets and sprogs, with on-device AI picking the best time to take a picture while still ensuring your privacy. Set it and forget it, and come back 30 minutes later to a beautiful photoset of little Tarquin destroying your petunias. $249, coming soon to the US only.

Pixel Buds: They’re wireless earphones, one of the most boring product categories known to humanity, but they have a cool simultaneous translation feature if you use them with a Pixel phone. £159/$159, available from 22 November.

Pixelbook: A slender hybrid tablet/laptop/phone, running Chrome OS and offering Google Assistant on the desktop. It’s 1kg heavy and 1cm thick, and starts at £999/$999 and will ship at the end of October. The Pixelbook Pen stylus costs £99 from the end of October.

Daydream View: the same VR headset you don’t know and have no strong opinions about, now in three new colours and with new lenses. £99/$99, available now.

One last product from Juston: Google Clips, a lifebloggy-style camera that takes pictures automatically: “Turn it on, and it captures the moment, so you can be in the moment.” Stick it to your wall while you’re playing with a pet, for instance, and the camera will snap images when you’re both in frame.

Could be creepy, but Google’s arguing it’s not: “It looks like a camera, and has an indicator when it’s on, so people know what it is and what it does,” says Juston, “and all the machine learning is on the device itself, so nothing leaves it until you choose it to.”

There’s more. Juston Payne comes on stage to introduce the upgraded Daydream View headset, with new lenses and new fabrics. It has more than 250 VR titles (including the Guardian, natch), and you can now cast your VR experience to the TV. That’ll cost $99.

Google’s also bringing out some wireless headphones, to make up for the lack of headphone jack on the Pixel 2. Called Pixel Buds, they’re not truly wireless earbuds – they’ve got a connecting cable running between the two ears – but they do work directly with Google Assistant.

One genuinely cool thing: the Pixel Buds allow direct, voice-to-voice translation. Your phone hears someone speak, and your earbuds play the translation in your native language. Early days, but this feels genuinely futuristic, and – for once – not in a creepy way.

Google claims it can support real-time translation in 40 languages through the Pixel Buds.

Queiroz leads with the number: DXOmark, which said last year’s Pixel was the best smartphone camera ever, says this year’s Pixel is the best smartphone camera ever. They gave it a score of 98. (DXOmark’s habit of doing this has earned it a few knocks over the past year, to be fair.)

More interestingly, the Pixel 2 camera has a portrait mode, like the iPhone Pluses, but thanks to Google’s “computational photography”, it can do it with just one camera. That means it can take a high depth-of-field image from the selfie camera, as well as the back camera on both the large and small devices.

Continuing the, er, iPhone inspiration, Google’s launched “motion photos”, which are live photos: they take some video around either side of the image.

The phones also have a really impressive “fused image stabilisation” feature for video, combining optical and digital video stabilisation to produce a very smooth looking output. Normally, this isn’t really possible – the optical image stabilisation that works for still photos tends to throw the lens about wildly for videos, but Google says it’s managed to fix that digitally.

Queiroz noted that Pixel users upload twice as many phones as iPhone users, and would run out of the free iCloud storage in just three months if they were with Apple. Photograph: Stephen Lam/Reuters

Of course, Google is all about the back-end: Pixel users get free unlimited storage on Google Photos.

In a direct swipe at the iPhone – the first explicit mention of the device all morning – Queiroz notes that Pixel users upload twice as many phones as iPhone users, and would run out of the free iCloud storage in just three months if they were with Apple.

He then leads on to a direct pitch: using a special accessory, iPhone users can switch in just 10 minutes or less.

The Pixel 2 will cost $649, and the Pixel 2 XL $849. Both can be pre-ordered today in six countries including US, UK and Australia, although Queiroz didn’t give a shipping date – rumour has it the XL will be shipping considerably later than the smaller Pixel.

To make up for that, perhaps, Pixel 2 owners will get a free Google Home Mini for a limited time.

Chennapragada introduces Google Lens. Hold up the camera to an advert, for instance, and you can automatically pull out the email address. Take a picture of a film poster or book cover to search for it. And so on.

Apparently Google wants to make that a verb: “just Lens it”. Which, coming from a company which hates that its own name actually is a verb, is A Bit Rich.

It’s also basically a product that Google launched three years ago, when it was called Google Goggles. I don’t doubt that Lens works a bit better, but it doesn’t seem that different.

Fresher is the other half of Lens: an AR-based sticker feature. It comes with a Stranger Things sticker set, courtesy of Netflix, so you can drop a cartoon monster and tween into the real world and make them fight. Like Pokémon but bleaker.

Ellis introduces the “Now Playing” feature, which listens for music and tells you what it hears. Interestingly, it does this without connecting to the net, through an on-device database of songs, which will be some salve to the privacy-aware among us.

Sabrina Ellis demonstrating a selfie with the Google Pixel 2. Photograph: Olivia Solon for the Guardian

She then moves to another new feature: “At a glance”, which lives on the homescreen. A permanent widget, the data display will launch with support for calendar events, but eventually become – yes – AI-powered, to include traffic, directions, weather and more.

Google has borrowed an idea from HTC, and you can now squeeze the phone to enable the assistant. Which Ellis does, then takes a selfie.

And we’re back to more Assistant features: you can use your phone to broadcast a Broadcast on your Homes that you’re coming home, and then tell your phone “let’s go home” to get it to begin your going home “Routine”.

Ellis passes over to Aparna Chennapragada to talk about the phone’s camera.

“We set out to design a phone ourselves, because we believed we could make the smartphone experience better,” Queiroz says, before introducing the Pixel 2.

It comes in two sizes, a 5in and a 6in XL, and we’re back to the buzzwords for today: “the best of hardware, software and AI”.

The phones look like we expected: the smaller phone has a rather chunky, iPhone 8-style bezel, but with an OLED screen, while the XL phone has a full-screen display, more like the iPhone X or Galaxy S8.

“Feel free to choose whichever sized pixel you want, because we don’t set aside better features for the larger device”, Queiroz says, in a knock at iPhones, before handing over to Sabrina Ellis, director of product management, to talk about the software features.

Pixelbook

Now we get Matt Vokoun, to announce the Pixelbook. “We’ve worked hard to combine the best parts of a laptop, tablet and smartphone,” he says.

It’s a small, sleek Chrome OS laptop: 10mm thick, 1kg heavy, with a fold-back screen that lets you use it as a tablet. It has a 12.3in touchscreen, and a backlit keyboard, with up to 16GB RAM and up to 512GB storage and a 10 hour battery.

Google’s also getting some of that convergence juice: if you can’t get on wifi with your Pixelbook, it will automatically tether through your Pixel Phone.

If you’re one of those people who speaks to their laptop, then a) why and b) you can speak to this laptop too, since it’s the first laptop with Google Assistant built in. To Vokoun’s credit, he acknowledges the weirdness, and the Pixelbook lets you type your request too. It also comes with a stylus: the Pixelbook Pen.

This being Google, of course, the Pen is AI powered. Circle something, and Google Assistant will look it up. Handwrite some text, and it will recognise it automatically.

You can also run Android apps on your laptop, which still seems more like an admission that Chrome OS isn’t quite there yet than it does a compelling selling point. But apparently there’s going to be something special in Snapchat for Pixelbook? So you can fold your laptop in half, open a phone app on it, hold it up and take a selfie?

It’s always dangerous to say “never” as a tech journalist but that will never happen.

The Pixelbook starts at $999, and the pen at $99, with pre-orders opening today for US, UK and Canada. It will ship 31 October onwards.

Google Home Max

SURPRISE ANNOUNCEMENT.

With a short video, Google shows the Google Home Max, a large, music-focused speaker. It can be paired in stereo, and looks like a direct competitor to the still unreleased Apple HomePod, or the Sonos One, announced literally just today.

“Just like the Pixel reimagined the camera, we’ll do the same with sound,” Chandra says. “To sound great, the speaker needs to adjust to your home. So today, we’re announcing smart sound, that allows the speaker to adjust to you: your home, your preferences.” This is the same basic technology offered by Sonos and Apple, although the Google offering sounds more, well, smart than those: raising the volume when you have the dishwasher on, retuning the speaker when you move it, and so on.

The speaker supports “YouTube Music, Spotify, and other music services”, apparently. Google’s own Google Play Music All Access is one of those services relegated to “others”, which can’t be great for the people working on that service.

It costs $399, and will come out in the US in December – yes, the same time as the HomePod – with a free 12 month subscription to YouTube Music.

We end with a video of Diplo using his Google Home exclusively to play his own songs. Classic Diplo.

Olivia Solon, our reporter in San Francisco, says:

The announcement of the Google Home Max received the most enthusiastic response from the audience so far, with a round of whoops and cheers.

Matsuoka gives way to Chandra again, who returns to talk about a new feature for the Home hardware called “Broadcast”: tell a Home to broadcast a message, and it will rebroadcast the command to every Home in the house – so a parent can say “broadcast ‘get ready for school’”, and the whole house will hear the message. It’s not clear if the kids also get the ability to broadcast “no, I’m staying in bed” back.

Chandra also says the Home has received a lot of support for children, with new understanding of kids’ voices, and support for the limited accounts that children under 13 can get linked to their parents’ main Google accounts.

Google’s partnered with Disney to bring a bunch of stories for families and kids, including Mickey Mouse, Cars, and Star Wars, and honestly, I’m quite jealous of the people with kids for that last one.